“Please Leave Quietly” works both as a title and an instruction. Entering and leaving as it implies it should: quietly. Through thirty eight minutes, Janusz spins a carousel of vignettes capturing some of the relational failures, deaths and other wellsprings of regret you’d expect to see from someone committed to not having a good time. A carousel of events that most would tuck away into the corners of the night that keep them up, here on vulnerable, naked display.
Harkening back to the tender weirdness of Lambchop, Smog or Arab Strap, Please Leave Quietly unravels within a tightly wrapped blanket of languid tempos, lush string sections, weaving pedal steel, sparkling guitars and the patient, crooned baritone of someone who is tired of being tired. As a one sided therapy session for the difficulties of the early days of oldness, Janusz carries us through his recent interpersonal losses, of the self and of others, romantic ineptitude and the magnetic pull of suicide towards an ambiguous conclusion. If any message is to be taken, it’s that things are not getting better, but that the downwards trajectory is expected and a habitat for Janusz. Despite a bleak overall theme, there’s a lack of misery on the album, it’s not wallowing in self-pity or melodramatically demanding anything, least of all sympathy, Janusz isn’t afraid to inject some Silver Jews style humour here and there, and prefers to present things in a matter-of-fact way that comes across with a great deal of intimacy and sincerity, like a warped confession inside the smallest church he could find.
There’s a Lou Reed interview where he states that Street Hassle was his attempt to write a song in the same vein that the likes of Raymond Chandler or Hubert Selby Jr would have written, were they musicians. Please Leave Quietly does the same, functioning comfortably as a soundtrack to Ingmar Bergman’s Trilogy or an auditory rendition of The Fire Within, providing a place for people of that ilk to congregate and be reminded once more that they are both unremarkable and not alone.
What we’re left with in the end is a polished, compact collection of cloistered, proximate songs crawling slowly over a gallery of romantic pragmatism, regret and an outlook of the world that’s somewhere between serious and slightly disappointed. Whether Janusz is leaving for now or leaving for good is unclear, but for now, there’s this.
credits
released April 5, 2024
Olin Janusz: Guitar, Vocals, Mellotron and Organ
David Murphy: Pedal Steel
Nikos Mavridis: Violin and Viola
Manon Rudant: Cello
Joan Sabatier: Drums
Sven Glory: Bass
Logan Farmer: Vocals (1, 6)
Vanessa González: Vocals (4)
Sairie: Vocals (1, 8)
Written, mixed and recorded by Olin Janusz
Additional recording by Raphaël Léger at 22 Recordings
Mastered by James Plotkin at Plotkinworks
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